Introducing: The Open Rights Exchange (ORE) Whitepaper, Enabling the First API Marketplace on the Blockchain

In the fall of 2017, we quietly started a new phase of product development at AIKON; the culmination of decades of research and development on a variety of technology projects — that underpin the company and technology we are announcing today.

Nearly two decades ago, our co-founder, Stefan Roever began building a rights management protocol — an idea which predated the blockchain — and waited patiently for the evolution of technology to turn the potential of his vision into reality.

The advent of blockchain, Ethereum computing and decentralized storage have paved the way for Stefan, co-founders Betsabe Martinez Botaitis, Marc Blinder and the AIKON team to bring the Open Rights Exchange (ORE) to market with what we believe are the two missing links of a truly decentralized economy.

Today, we are proud and honored to unveil, the ORE Whitepaper — our vision, mission and contribution to serve the decentralized economy — along with access to the alpha version of our Github repository.

The ORE Whitepaper details two complementary products that we’re building to contribute to the decentralized community:

The decentralized Open Rights Exchange (ORE) Protocol, which allows any API interaction to be mapped to the blockchain. The ORE protocol uses Smart Contracts and cryptocurrency for payments and rights management of APIs, which in turn can be used to provide access to any Internet service.

The API Marketplace — our first use case for the ORE Protocol: a marketplace for APIs on the blockchain, which makes it incredibly easy for API providers to create value and capture their fair share of the $2.2 trillion API economy, while providing API consumers a standardized way to purchase and integrate APIs faster, easier, and more securely.

This Whitepaper is the product of hard work all around — many thanks to our team, advisors, and partners who have been a great help to us along the way. Special thanks to ConsenSys for ongoing guidance and support.

We’re thrilled to present the first set of tools and offerings we’re building at AIKON, and encourage you to reach out with some details about your project if you’d like to become an alpha partner to test our protocol early.